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"Imagining Women's Property reframes how we think about Victorian women's changing economic rights and their representation in fiction. Although the (ironically insolvent) legal advisors of Dickens's novel might have been unable to conceive of or "produce [...] law for tying" the kind of "knot" required by women's financial claims in 1855, the reform of married women's property law between 1856 and 1882 nonetheless constituted one of the largest economic transformations England had ever seen, as well as one of its most significant challenges to family traditions. At the start of this period, marriage meant the complete loss of a woman's common-law property rights to her husband; by its end, wives could independently claim their own income and inheritance, choose how to spend, invest, or give away their money, and write wills bequeathing their property. Unsurprisingly, marriage and marital law have been useful lenses for viewing these changing financial rights: wives once "covered" by their husbands through the doctrine of coverture reclaimed their own assets, regained economic agency, and forever altered the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock by doing so. Yet in many literary accounts, married women's property reform was neither as decisive nor as limited as this model suggests. Not only did legal mechanisms coexist and frequently "collide" with familial claims, but the reallocation of wealth affected far more than spouses or the marital state. Indeed, even fictional contemplation of women's greater economic agency, in the years leading up to these legal changes, produced narratives that show the ramifications of women's property rights for other kin ("say a brother, say a father") and communities. Understanding the reform of married women's property as both an ideologically and materially significant redistribution of the nation's wealth as well as one complicated by competing cultural traditions, I explore the widespread ways in which women's financial agency was imagined by prominent literary authors and their readers during this transformative period"--

English fiction --- Women's rights in literature --- Right of property in literature

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Women's rights in literature --- Discourse analysis [Literary ] --- Literature and society - Great Britain - History - 19th century.

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Feminism and literature --- -Women and literature --- -Women's rights in literature --- Feminism in literature --- Feminist theory in literature --- Literature --- History --- -History --- -Women authors --- Wollstonecraft, Mary --- -Wollstonecraft, Mary --- -Criticism and interpretation --- Influence --- Feminism in literature. --- Women and literature --- Women's rights in literature. --- Political philosophy. Social philosophy --- Thematology --- Sociology of the family. Sociology of sexuality --- anno 1700-1799 --- Great Britain --- Women's rights in literature --- Wollstonecraft, Mary, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Influence. --- Cresswick, --- Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, --- Feminism --- Writers --- Book --- Political philosophy

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Sociology of literature --- German literature --- anno 1970-1979 --- anno 1980-1989 --- Droits des femmes dans la littérature --- Vrouwenrechten in de literatuur --- Women's rights in literature --- Germany (East) --- Women authors

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As the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, novels about politically active women became increasingly common. Until now, however, no one has studied this body of writing as a distinct tradition in American literature. In Romancing the Vote, Leslie Petty recovers this tradition and also examines how the fiction written about the women's rights and related movements contributed to the creation and continued vitality of those movements. Petty examines the novels as paradigms of feminist activism and reform communities and elucidates how they, whether wittingly or not, model ways to create similar communities in the real world. She demonstrates how the narratives provide insight into the hopes and anxieties surrounding some of the most important political movements in American history and how they encapsulate the movements' paradoxical blend of progressive and conservative ideologies. The major works discussed are Elizabeth Boynton Harbert's Out of Her Sphere (1871), Lillie Devereux Blake's Fettered for Life (1874), Henry James's The Bostonians (1886), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), Hamlin Garland's A Spoil of Office (1892), Marjorie Shuler's For Rent-One Pedestal (1917), Elizabeth Jordan's edited volume The Sturdy Oak (1917), and Oreola Williams Haskell's Banner Bearers: Tales of the Suffrage Campaigns (1920). Although these works discredit many traditional notions about gender and inspire their readers to seek fairness and equality for many American women, they often simultaneously perpetuate discriminatory ideas about other marginalized groups. They not only privilege the experiences of white women but also rely on widespread anxieties about racial and ethnic minorities to demonstrate the need for gender reform. By focusing on such tensions between conventional and unconventional ideas about gender, race, and class, Petty shows how the fiction of this period helps to situate first-wave feminism within a larger historical and cultural context.

Suffrage in literature. --- Women's rights in literature. --- Women --- Politics and literature --- Feminism and literature --- Political fiction, American --- Feminist fiction, American --- American fiction --- Literature --- Literature and politics --- Suffrage --- History. --- History and criticism. --- Political aspects --- Women authors --- Literature and feminism